societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in Paris when I
first met with J.M. Synge, and I have known what it is to be changed by
that I would have changed, till I became argumentative and unmannerly,
hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And though I was never
convinced that the anatomies of last year's leaves are a living forest,
or thought a continual apologetic could do other than make the soul a
vapour and the body a stone; or believed that literature can be made by
anything but by what is still blind and dumb within ourselves, I have had
to learn how hard in one who lives where forms of expression and habits
of thought have been born, not for the pleasure of begetting but for the
public good, is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignity,
arrogance, which is the discovery of style. But it became possible to
live when I had learnt all I had not learnt in shaping words, in
defending Synge against his enemies, and knew that rich energies, fine,
turbulent or gracious thoughts, whether in life or letters, are but
love-children.




VII


Synge seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought, and with
the exception of one sentence, spoken when I first met him in Paris, that
implied some sort of nationalist conviction, I cannot remember that he
spoke of politics or showed any interest in men in the mass, or in any
subject that is studied through abstractions and statistics. Often for
months together he and I and Lady Gregory would see no one outside the
Abbey Theatre, and that life, lived as it were in a ship at sea, suited